The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners.

There has been a steady rise in the amount of education and training programs that have begun to make use of virtual reality (VR). From learning how to repair and maintain aircraft, to teaching doctors how to perform certain procedures, or teaching children about the solar system, the range of use that VR is being put to is huge and getting bigger.

Virtual reality (VR) began its climb back into the social consciousness in 2013 with the launch of the well-documented Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift. In the four years that have passed since, things have become more complicated. Augmented reality (AR) has finally begun its ascent and Microsoft has muddied the waters with the HoloLens purporting to deliver 'mixed reality' (MR).

Virtual reality allows students to be absolutely captivated by the teaching. All teachers want their students to fully concentrate on their lesson. Some students struggle to concentrate in class but will in their spare time devote many hours of concentration to gaming.

Shortly after the Women's March in January this year we conducted a survey among teachers to learn about how they integrate topics such as global women's rights in their teaching. 90% of the respondents said their students are interested in questions related to gender equality, but 42% said this topic is not covered in their curriculum.

For the sixth-grade class at Davis Magnet School in Costa Mesa, the science lesson for the day means keeping textbooks and notebooks on the shelves while the students pull out virtual reality viewers by Google Cardboard and their smartphones preloaded with 3D videos found on YouTube.

When I wrote about my high hopes for edtech back in August, student-created virtual reality was near the top of my list. I envisioned students incorporating guided VR into presentations, and creating augmented reality-triggered videos to explain their learning. Since then, VR has taken off in popula

Immersive virtual reality experiences offer powerful ways to engage students and create new learning opportunities in the classroom. As the technology and awareness about using VR in education continue to mature, so do the options available for teachers. Google Expeditions remains one of the most well-known options for teachers to consider.

A maturing virtual reality marketplace is bringing an increasing number of cost-effective viewer and content options to the K-12 market. Cardboard viewers paired with smart phones remain the lowest-cost option on the market, though Ed Tech: Focus on K-12 reports Google offers a foam-and-fabric Daydream Viewer for $79, Samsung will soon release its Gear VR Headset for $129, and Microsoft is working on its own viewers with Lenovo, Acer and others.

Europe's booming virtual reality ecosystem now consists of nearly 300 companies, according to the first European Virtual Reality landscape released by The Venture Reality Fund and France's LucidWeb. Silicon Valley-based venture firm The Venture Reality Fund tracks investments in the augmented reality and VR markets, but most of the action in the past has focused on U.S.

Over the past year, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology have become hot topics, particularly when it comes to how they stack up against each other. Enthusiastic publications are treating these two as fiercely competitive technologies, while in fact, it's much more likely there will be a place for both in our future.

If you can't afford a field trip to the International Space Station, donning a boxy black headset might be the next best thing. To take advantage of the latest in 3-D technology, teachers are increasingly expressing interest in using virtual reality to enhance science education.

Despite all the headlines and conference coverage of virtual reality (VR) for education over the last year, the technology is still gaining speed - residing at that sweet spot in the hype cycle where, when you place headsets on people and gently guide them to turn around to gain a full view, they tend to gasp and say, 'Oh, wow.'

The proliferation of cheaper, mass-produced consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) applications are finding their niche in retail. The technology, which was often synonymous with customized and expensive equipment, has been a long-time staple for military training, civil flight training, and industrial 3D modeling.

Last September we reported on the fact that Qualcomm was launching their own VR development kit with the ability to deliver standalone VR. What made the VR 820 so compelling was that it had 6-DoF tracking as well as integrated compute (Snapdragon 820) which was on par with all the latest flagship phones.

The lack of quality Virtual Reality (VR) content is a bigger barrier than hardware shortcomings in the adoption of VR, say industry watchers during a panel discussion on VR at a workshop conducted at the Nasscom warehouse. The VR storyteller guild workshop conducted in partnership with Nasscom is aimed to promote VR by creating a community of VR content creators.

Virtual Reality is older than you might think. Brave pioneers have been trying to craft the perfect computer simulated world for decades. In 1968, MIT computer scientist Ivan Sutherland created the first VR and AR head-mounted display system designed to help helicopter pilots land at night by synchronizing low-light cameras and head movements. The technology, aptly dubbed ‘The Sword of Damocles’, was so heavy it needed to be attached to the ceiling with a mechanical arm. The Sword of Damocles and all its innovative but equally unpractical successors quickly faded into obscurity.

Despite the early attempts to harness the power of VR for professional purposes, VR only really gained traction when it made its first foray into gaming. In 1991, the Japanese video developer company Sega announced the Sega VR headset for arcade games. Causing headaches and motion sickness, the headset wasn’t as successful as Sega had hoped. Other gaming and entertainment companies, however, quickly picked up where Sega left off, developing increasingly advanced hardware that ultimately culminated in the release of the Oculus Rift on March 28, 2016. Since then, investments by tech giants like Facebook, Google and Sony have propelled VR to one of the most talked about consumer entertainment technologies in 2016.

However, VR is now heading into real business, research and education applications. Over the next two decades, VR will revolutionise the way we learn and work to such an extent that its origins in games will merely be recalled as a fond curiosity. VR is not unique in this respect: there are multiple technologies that are undergoing a similar transformation and only reach their full potential once they have been successfully adapted by other markets. Take for example the blockchain, the technology underpinning the bitcoin digital currency infamously associated with the drug trade, arms trafficking, pornography, and gambling, which in its second generation is hailed as a newuniversal banking system by Wall Street professionals.

At Weird Science Lab, we see education as on of the most important applications for VR. The benefits VR can bring to education are endless: curriculum expansion, a reduction of the cost per student associated with the traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curriculum, increased student motivation, increased interaction, truly immersive experiences and the ability to bring top-quality education to disadvantaged students across the world.

VR’s effectiveness in education is already proven by countless successful pilot projects. Examples include the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, which employs the world’s first fully interactive virtual reality medical training simulator to provide its students with a real immersive trauma room experience and schools in Florida that offer virtual field trip lessons to sites like the ancient pyramids of Egypt, Mars, and patriotic U.S landmarks.

While VR in education is still the exception rather than the rule, there are clear signals that VR is about to explode. Weird Science Lab works with Oxford University Press (OUP) to free their traditional STEM curriculum for secondary and higher education from the 15th-century shackles of the Gutenberg printing press by providing third generation Virtual and Augmented Reality lessons.

OUP alone reaches millions of students from India to Nigeria and dominates the STEM and humanities curriculums from secondary school to higher education. It’s only a matter of time before OUP’s competitors will follow suit and partner with VR companies to transform their curriculum. The global distribution of VR content together with the economic scaling of the VR headsets means hundreds of millions of students across the globe will soon be walking on the moon’s surface and carrying out zero-gravity experiments in virtual labs.

For many years, schools and universities have had to change the way they work and teach in order to fit in with technology. Software like PowerPoint, for example, which has long been used as an education tool, wasn't designed for education.

IN DEPTH: The short answer is 'yes.' The long answer? Well, that's a bit more complicated... One of the main topics of conversation at education technology expo Bett 2017 was around virtual reality (VR) and whether the technology actually has a place in our school and college classrooms. At the show, there were a handful of companies showing off 'classroom VR' experiences, with several others featuring headsets on their stands to in an attempt to persuade educators of the merits of VR.

By now, you've probably heard a lot about STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Careers in STEM are the next best thing: as a matter of fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, jobs in STEM will increase by up to 30 percent by 2022, a dramatic increase over the average industry projection ...